Without My Mother: A Daughter’s Search for the Mother Who Abandoned Her | Melissa Cistaro
This provocative, poignant memoir of a daughter whose mother left her behind by choice begs the question: Are we destined to make the same mistakes as our parents? One summer, Melissa Cistaro’s mother drove off without a word. Devastated, Melissa and her brothers were left to pick up the pieces, wondering why their mother abandoned them. Decades later, Melissa finds herself in Olympia, Washington, with her dying mother and just days to find out what happened that summer and confront the fear that she could do the same to her kids. She never expects to stumble on a cache of letters her mother wrote but never sent her, which could hold the answers she seeks. Haunting yet ultimately uplifting, Without My Mother chronicles one woman’s quest to discover what drives a mother to walk away from the children she loves. Alternating between Melissa’s tumultuous coming-of-age and her mother’s final days, this captivating memoir reveals how our parents’ choices impact our own and how we can survive those to forge our own paths.
Without My Mother: A Daughter’s Search for the Mother Who Abandoned Her |